ADDIE

Hi, I’m Damian, co-founder of Capytech. And today I’m going to be discussing ADDIE, one of the granddaddies of the instructional design methodologies originally founded back in actually World War Two and then formalized in around 1975 for the US Army. But today I’m actually going to focus upon how we can still apply it in the context of e-learning. So we’ll go through the various phases of the ADDIE process step by step. We’ll explore how general principles of ADDIE still naturally apply, but then also we’ll apply it to the e-learning scenario, which will be the focus where we’ll be discussing today.

So of course, the first area of ADDIE is the Analysis Phase. And analysis doesn’t change dramatically when you’re thinking about delivering your learning in e-learning or in a blended type of approach. You still need to conduct a needs assessment to find out what people actually need to learn, what your organizational objectives and so on. You’ll also still be determining who the target audience is. Now, the one consideration you might have here is the modality that you might deliver to learning might vary according to perhaps the age demographic that you’re delivering it too. So there might be stereotypes there where a younger demographic might gel better with e-learning, and that may we be true in some cases. Or if you’ve got a maybe a much older demographic, then they may not feel quite so confident in adopting some of the principles of e-learning there. So it’s certainly something you want to factor in during this analysis phase. And the other component that we’ll add here for e-learning particularly is the technical requirements. Soif you’re launching this on a learning platform, what are the limitations of that system? Where can people access it from? And so on. So you want to understand what your system is capable of, making sure that it’s performant enough that it can be operated in the workplace or on mobile devices and so on. This can all be done during your initial analysis phase.

Then we’ll go into Design. So in a similar method that you would be doing, say, in classroom training, you want to create your full course outlines. Your scripts, your scripts are perhaps even more important here in e-learning, for when it’s an instructor driven content, then you’ll often have a subject expert who will deliver the materials. So you might give them a few bullet points and they can run with it an they’ll give their experiences and so on as a part of the delivery of the training in e-learning. You don’t have, most of the time an instructor there. So that means that the training’s got to stand alone on itself. So that means the level of detail that you need to put into scripts, course outlines, and the materials you’re developing there need to be very, very strong and very robust. The same way that you’ll be measuring learning objective, you’ve got to apply that here. And when you’re developing your content, you’ll of course, outline your learning objectives. You’ll reinforce that to the learner, and then, of course, you’re going to want to be assessing that.

Talk more about that in the Development Phase, in the design of the course. Whereas in the past you might have had purely online is designed to be instructor led, you’ve got a few other options now. So you might have a blended approach, which I love, where you’ve got the best of kind of both worlds of delivering content online, like giving people pre reading materials, assessing their knowledge before they even come to a classroom, and then combining that with an instructor in a classroom, getting all their subject expertise all the way to being a fully online course, which we see a lot of as well, where there is 100% delivery of the content online. So you’ve got, I guess, a spectrum from fully classroom delivered materials to fully online materials, and various levels of blended in between. So you can decide on what might be the most appropriate according to the nature of the content itself, how experiential it is, how theoretical it is, how much you are reliant upon subject expertise of individuals, their availability, and also, I guess, how much you need to be able to scale that as well.

If it’s got to go out to thousands of people in many different locations, then perhaps a 100% online approach might be the most appropriate. So now looking into the development phase, which is really where Capytech gets heavily involved. So this is where we’re going in and taking what we often call the source materials, the scripts and so on, and developing in into e-learning content. Now, you might hear terms like Scorm, Xapi, HTML five, and various other terminologies here about how you are going to offer this content. We typically use a tool, a tool called Articulate Storyline, which is certainly a market leader in developing interactive e-learning materials, and that’s what we typically focus on. But there are a number of different options there, including authoring content directly onto a learning platform itself, which has got pros and cons to that as well. So once you understand what the e-learning authoring tools capabilities are and what the limitations are, of course you can then decide on the development approach that you’ll be having there. Usually we will at the, I guess a higher end will take some gamified approach to learning, where we’ve got learning journeys, various formative and the summative assessments and so on as a part of that learning journey. Or you can have a much more linear approach where it’s more, I guess, slide by slide with various multimedia incorporated there as well as part of the learning.

When you’ve got some content developed, either a part of the course or the full course, you can do some pilot testing. So roll that our, perhaps digitally to a smaller audience where you can get a value, valuable feedback on how well that is developed, how effective the training is, and then consider how you might further roll it out wider, which I’ll go on to next. Also, a key factor here is accessibility and usability. You want to make sure that everything works, that people who have particular accessibility needs are catered for. We’ve got screen readers and so on. And the way that you develop the e-learning is also able to be consumed by then. That is of course a vital thing to factor into.

Now moving to the Implementation Phase, this is where launching the course. So we typically deliver like gold version of a module that’ll be uploaded to a learning management system, although there are options outside of the LMS, and then we’ll actually launch the platform. We often recommend that you’ll have some kind of launch media, which we often package in with our likes, customer success plans, where you promote the course before it launch. Then you’ve got a communications plan to make sure people are aware of the course as well. So in the end you’re launching it, they’ll get logins, I’ll have link and various other things to be able to access the course. Now, when we’re talking about onboarding instructions, there will still be people who are new to e-learning, and so you want to give them some instructions over how to use the learning management system. So you can have guided walkthroughs of that if they’re new to that, or it’s a new platform. And you can have it inside the module itself where you give them a tour around the module. Like here’s the navigation, here’s where you move around the module. This is where you can come back home. This is a learning journey you’ll be undertaking, and so that can be very valuable to make sure that people are getting the most out of the onboarding or the e-learning itself.

And then we’ll go into, I love this Social Learning. So in the classroom, there’s a lot of synchronous learning that happens, like people asking questions, people giving anecdotes and so on. In e-learning, it’s much typically much less synchronous. It’s asynchronous learning, with some exceptions. So on you learning platform, you’ll deliver some content, perhaps that’s in scorm interactive format, but then you can have forums and chats and so on set up to help facilitate that learning. The great example I like to give is having, let’s say, a forum which is built to be primarily asynchronous. People post when they want to ask questions about the content. So student A, ask questions about the materials, student B responds to that person’s question, and then the facilitator can come in and say, yes, that’s correct. And also consider this. This is a great, I guess, scenario of social learning where you’ve got stronger students that are assisting perhaps the weaker students or those with questions and better enabling everybody to reach learning objectives, all being supervised by the facilitators as well. Naturally, you can also have chats too, that might be built in, so you have someone dedicated that will come online at certain times to help facilitate the learning. And they can do that in real time, either via chat or perhaps via webinar as well.

With e-learning, of course, it’s all, if you’re delivering via LMS, it’s all, if you’re delivering via LMS, it’s all trackable. So you can see who’s participating when they’re participating, when engagement is higher. And crucially, one of the risks with e-learning is that people never actually access it. So you can identify those that are perhaps at higher risk, target them with communications to make sure they can access a system if they’ve got any technical issues, and so on, and making sure that they do actually go in and go through the learning as you’re delivering it.

?And then finally, Evaluation. This doesn’t change dramatically in e-learning, except that we’ve got online tools that can facilitate it. So you can get feedback directly after some period after and assess their performance data too. Now, with artificial intelligence, of course, we’ve got ability to capture that information, which we’ve had for a while, but then also be able to gain more insight from that raw data. So if you’re rolling it our to perhaps thousands of people, you can plug that information into AI and then get further insight from that information as well, beyond just charts and so forth. So, and collecting tat learner feedback is of course vital to make sure that the content is actually hitting the mark, and so on. So that’s just a quick overview of using ADDIE in e-learning. It is indeed one of the very oldest instructional design approaches, but it is till very valid, and many of the more recent instruction design philosophies are taken or inspired from ADDIE. I hope this was helpful

And if you have any questions about this or e-learning in general, then feel free to get in touch.

Original Post